Monthly Archives: September 2007

According to Slashfood, which keeps me up to date on such important holidays as National Cherries Jubilee Day, Saturday was National Coffee Day. Well, unlike National Cherries Jubilee Day, I did consume some coffee Saturday, which is barely yesterday. It is 1:15 a.m. now. And surprise, surprise, I am wired and tired.

Ummm, anatomy is kicking my ass right now. I am not looking forward to Monday.

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Zach is a wonderful kid. He is very sweet, funny and perceptive. He is always talking, always. He jibber jabbers to himself. He makes up funny voices for his toys. He always wants to eat. He loves Star Wars. He loves his family so much, and loves to show affection. He has such cute quirks, like shrugging his shoulder and tilting his head to one side when he is explaining something. When I ask what he did at school, he always says “I played with my friends.” Usually with the above gesture. He is learning things at his new school like a sponge. He sings new songs every day, and spots the letter Z everywhere (and the letter N, which he thinks is a sideways Z.)

I love you Zach. Happy birthday.

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According to this article in the Guardian, man made chemicals are disrupting the male/female ration of babies being born in the Northern Hemisphere. It has gotten so bad the farther North you travel (apparently some of these compounds are carried by wind) that some areas of Russia, Greenland and Canada are having twice and many female offspring as male. And, in one Inuit village, they are ONLY HAVING GIRL BABIES now. These chemicals really concentrate in their traditional diets that are heavy in larger ocean animals and meat.

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That is the one of the many Facebook groups whose name I like. (One other is “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene”, but that one is not as humorous.) And, it can be true.

I am not a fan of dissection in gross anatomy. I not only find it moderately disgusting, especially today (warning, GROSS, no pun intended) when we had to flip the body, and the ungloved portion of my arm was submerged in the collected juices at the bottom of the body bag as I tried to pry the already dissected arm (which was a bunch of exposed muscles and tendons) out from under the rather cumbersome cadaver, but I also don’t think I learn much from dissection.

A lot of people find gross anatomy disgusting. Some classmates love it. One of our team of five students who shares my body is a gung ho future surgeon who loves it. Two of us are moderately grossed out, but we dissect because of our work ethic, and the remaining two hold the book, keep their hands clean just in case we need them to touch something or pick something up (how thoughtful!) and chat with each other.

Well, that was all fine and good, since it’s hard to have five people dissecting at once, but now they are offering reviews in the prosected lab across the hall during gross lab time. So, we are supposed to TAKE TURNS looking at the already well dissected bodies and getting lectured to by various professors and fellows. Well, you can guess which two students are always in that lab. These demonstration / reviews are really helpful, and I find them MUCH more informative for the future exams than spending two hours cleaning fat off of the front of the lower leg and foot of our cadaver. Well, I had to insist that one of the two non-dissectors come back to the lab and take her turn dissecting, and she was livid. She told me off, and told off the other classmate of mine who is a good sport about dissecting and was waiting for her in the dissection lab to take her place.

I am so annoyed. This is not personal. No one likes to dissect. OK, most people don’t like to, and several people do, but only one out of our group of five really likes it. The rest of us are grossed out, too. (Again, no pun intended, but it is a very accurate word.) So, why is it up to me to tell a fellow student to pull her friggin weight and also let the rest of us get the benefit of the review, and why do two of us get an earful over it?

So, when we got back to our body, there was negligible work done, the dissection was not completed, and two of us had missing tools. I was joking on our way back to the lab that she probably threw our equipment out, but I was shocked when I got in there and two of us had things missing. I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I was pretty pissed off.